e he had twelve
hundred dollars in gold, which he had earned by his two years' work in
Cuba. By the light of the flashes of lightning I saw the bag in his
hand. It was an old shot-bag, tied up with a piece of white tape.
Wallbridge said he was afraid the bag might cost him his life, if he
held on to it, and I suppose he thought he might have to swim, and the
weight of the gold would sink him.

"I have figured up the weight of twelve hundred dollars in gold, and I
found it would be almost five pounds and a half Troy, or nearly four and
a half Avoirdupois. I don't blame him now for wanting to get rid of it;
but I did not think before I figured it up, that the money would weigh
so much. Four and a half pounds is not much for a man to carry on land,
but I should not want to be obliged to swim with this weight in my
trousers' pocket, even when I was in good health.

"Wallbridge said he would bury the money in the sand, under a projecting
rock in the cliff, so that he could come and get it when he wanted it.
Just then a flash of lightning came, and I looked up at the cliff under
which he stood. I saw the projecting rock, and it looked to me, in the
blaze of the lightning, just like a coffin, from where I stood. It
seemed to me then just like a sign from Heaven that I should soon need a
coffin, if the sea did not carry me off; but if the sign meant anything,
it did not apply to me, but to Wallbridge, who in less than half an hour
afterwards was swallowed up in the waves. I am sorry for him, and I only
hope he had not done anything very bad, for I could not help thinking he
had committed some crime."

Leopold did not see why the writer should think so; but then he had not
read the preceding pages of the diary, which Harvey Barth had written
just before the passenger came to the galley to light his pipe. The
narrative, after a digression of half a page of reflections upon the
unhappy fate of Wallbridge, continued:--

"Wallbridge got down on his knees, and scooped out a hole not more than
a foot deep in the sand, and dropped the bag into it. I looked up at the
projecting rock again, when another flash of lightning came, and there
was the coffin, just as plain as though it had been made for one of us.
It was not a whole coffin, but only the head end of one. It seemed to
project and overhang the beach at an angle of about forty-five degrees,
and a man could have sat down on the upper end, which was about twenty
feet high. The s